Year after year, Pythonists all over are churning out more code than ever. People are learning, the ecosystem is flourishing, and everything is running smoothly, right up until packaging. Packaging Python is fundamentally un-Pythonic. It can be a tough lesson to learn, but across all environments and applications, there is no one obvious, right way to deploy. Frankly, it’s hard to think of an area where Python’s Zen applies less.
At PayPal, we write and deploy our fair share of Python, and we wanted to devote a couple minutes to our story and give credit where credit is due. For conclusion seekers, without doubt or further ado: Continuum Analytics’ Anaconda Python distribution has made our lives so much easier. For small- and medium-sized teams, no matter the deployment scale, Anaconda has big implications. But let’s talk about how we got here.
Beginnings
Right now, PayPal Python Infrastructure provides equitable support for Windows, OS X, Linux, and Solaris, supporting various combinations of 32-bit and 64-bit Python 2.6, Python 2.7, and PyPy 5.
Glossing over the primordial days, when Kurt and I started building the Python platform at PayPal, we didn’t know we would be building the first cross-platform stack the company had ever seen. It was December 2012, we just wanted to see every developer unwrap a brand new laptop running PayPal Python services locally.
What ensued was the most intense engineering sprint I had ever experienced. We ported critical functionality previously only available in shared objects we had been calling into with ctypes. Several key parts were available in binary form only and had to be disassembled. But with the New Year, 2013, we were feeling like a whole new stack. All the PayPal-specific parts of our framework were pure-Python and portable. Just needed to install a few open-source libraries, like gevent, greenlet, maybe lxml. Just pip install, right?
Up the hill
In an environment where Python is still a new technology to most, pip is often not available, let alone understood. This learning curve can represent a major hurdle to many. We wanted more people to be able to write Python, and even more to be able to run it, as many places as possible, regardless of whether they were career Pythonists. So with a judicious shake of Python simplicity, we adopted a policy of “vendoring in” all of our core dependencies, including compiled extensions, like gevent.
This model yields somewhat larger repositories, but the benefits outweighed a few extra seconds of clone time. Of all the local development stories, there is still no option more empowering than the fully self-contained repository. Clone and run. A process so seamless, it’s like a miniature demo that goes perfect every time. In a world of multi-hour C++ and Java builds, it might as well be magic.
“So what’s the problem?”
Static builds. Every few months (or every CVE) the Python team would have to sit down to refresh, regression test, and certify a new set of libraries. New libraries were added sparingly, which is great for auditability, but not so great for flexibility. All of this is fine for a tight set of networking, cryptography, and serialization libraries, but no way could we support the dozens of dependencies necessary for machine learning and other advanced Python use cases.
And then came Anaconda. With the Anaconda Python distribution, Continuum is doing effectively what our team had been doing, but for free, for everyone, for hundreds of libraries. Finally, there was a standard option that made Python even simpler for our developers.
Adopting and adapting
As soon as we had the opportunity, we made Anaconda a supported platform for development. From then on, regardless of platform, Python beginners got one of two introductions: Install Anaconda, or visit our shared Jupyter Notebook, also backed by Anaconda.
The good kind of escalation
Today, Anaconda has gone beyond development environments to enable production PayPal machine learning applications for the better part of a year. And it’s doing so with more optimizations than we can shake a stick at, including running all the intensive numerical operations on Intel’s MKL. From now on, Python applications exist on a moving walkway to production perfection.
This was realized through two Anaconda packaging models that work for us. The first preinstalls a complete Anaconda on top of one of PayPal’s base Docker images. This works, and is buzzword-compliant, but for reasons outside the scope of this post, also entails maintaining a single large Docker image with the dependencies of all our downstream users.
As with all packaging, there’s always another way. One alternative approach that has worked well for us involves a little Continuum project known as Miniconda. This minimalist distribution has just enough to make Python and conda work. At build time, our applications package Miniconda, the bzip2 conda archives of the dependencies, and a Python installer, wrapped up with a CalVer filename. At deploy time, we install Miniconda, then conda install the dependencies. No downloads, no compilation, no outside dependencies. The code is only a little longer than the description of the process. Conda envs are more powerful than virtualenvs, and have a better cross-platform, cross-dev/prod story, as well. Developers enjoy the increased control, smaller packages, and applicability across both standard and containerized environments.
Packages to come
As stated in Enterprise Software with Python, packaging and deployment is not the last step. The key to deployment success is uniform, well-specified environments, with minimal variation between development and production. Or use Anaconda and call it good enough! We sincerely thank the Anaconda contributors for their open-source contributions, and hope that their reach spreads to ever more environments and runtimes.